


A harbour in the tempest

by TheAssassinsGhost



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Domestic, Fluff, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Romance, Spoilers, Time Skips, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 15:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10744482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAssassinsGhost/pseuds/TheAssassinsGhost
Summary: Only Thomas could turn pillow talk into a serious discussion.Follows on from my original fic.





	A harbour in the tempest

“James?”

James cracked a weary eye open to see his beloved gazing at him questioningly. 

Their day had been most pleasant. Full of energy that morning, Thomas had requested that they go swimming. James had scoffed and rolled his eyes, though he gave in with the compromise that Thomas could swim while James would read. Thomas was almost childlike in his enthusiasm as they reached the deserted beach which lay just beyond their home. They had barely set foot on the sand before Thomas had eagerly stripped off his shoes and shirt, tossing them to his surprised lover before racing down to the tide and wading out through the waves until the water came up to his waist level.

James had shaken his head fondly while he sat down on the soft sand and began to read. Every now and again he would look up from his book to see how his beloved was faring. By now Thomas was swimming leisurely, his precise swimming strokes he’d inherited from his days at Eton mixed rebelliously with careless, messy strokes. At one point James had looked up and was momentarily alarmed to see him vanished completely from sight, before Thomas had re-emerged to the surface, blond hair darkened with water, grinning widely.   
Later Thomas had joined him on the sand, looking spectacularly dashing in his soaked trousers and damp hair glowing lighter in the sunlight, smile dazzling. The sight of him soaking wet, healthy and happy made something in James’ chest tighten. 

That evening James had made them a nice meal, complete with vegetables that they’d grown in their garden. Thomas had barely pushed his plate aside before being pleasantly surprised by the sight of James slowly going onto his knees before him while unlacing the front of Thomas’ trousers. Thomas did nothing but smirk and lift himself from his chair slightly to make it easier for his lover to pull his trousers down over his hips. 

He could feel the teasingly warm breath against the inside of his thigh. “My lord.”

“My lieutenant.” He groaned as he carded his fingers through the auburn hair of his lover.  
There wasn’t much words exchanged after that. 

Afterwards they’d somehow made it to their bed, James wasn’t sure when exactly but he vaguely remembered Thomas protesting against using the table- they’d broken it the last time and it had taken the better part of a day to fix. If anything, James didn’t fancy pulling splinters out of various places afterwards, so he’d hastily agreed. They were now mere minutes into the afterglow, pleasantly sated yet tired. Or at least James was exhausted, even if his partner, so it seemed, was not.

Thomas was watching him through half-closed eyes, a small, fond smile on his face. He was currently massaging James’ hair with one hand while his partner’s head lay on his chest, James’ hand tracing nonsense symbols on his lover’s stomach. He had been enjoying the peace of post-coital bliss, dozing contentedly until the soft sound of his love’s voice disturbed him.

“Yes?” he mumbled.

“Can I ask you something?”

Any other time, James would have requested that it wait until morning when he was fully awake. But seeing Thomas so freshly ravaged, hair on end, sweat still glistening on his torso, fresh dark marks where James had claimed him on his neck, hips and collarbone already forming, James found he couldn’t deny him anything.

“Go on.” He grunted.

“Do you ever miss the sea?”

Weariness momentarily forgotten, James’ head lifted to stare at Thomas with a frown. “Where on earth did that question come from?”

Thomas shrugged. “I’m just curious.”

James crossed his arms on Thomas’ chest and rested his chin on them, locking eyes challengingly with his beloved. Thomas Hamilton had never been subtle a day in his life.

Thomas was not in the least bit put off. “The ‘call of the sea’ is a term I’ve heard used quite a bit during my days in London. I’m just curious as to what extent it’s true, after all you were first in the navy and then a pirate, so you must have felt some kind of pull. Or maybe if you’ve felt it since you gave it all up.”

James immediate reaction was to deny the question completely, shocked that his love would even consider it. But seeing in Thomas’ eyes that he was genuinely just curious, he begrudgingly decided to make more of an effort with his answer. This was strikingly alike to their first ever discussions, whereby Thomas would be in the habit of asking his opinion on something which at first would seem so frustratingly obvious, then only after much thought would appear to be more complicated in its entirety. 

In the six years they’d spent in this abandoned hunting lodge they had claimed as their own after escaping the plantation, James had not given much thought to the sea. It was convenient yet for the most part coincidental that the sea lay just a mile beyond their home, and James had been glad of it for Thomas’ sake more so than his own.   
He understood its appeal for Thomas. Thomas had been forced to spend a decade of his life within walls or bars, his only real scenery being miles of cane fields for so long. Thomas saw the sea as wide and open plains, unrestricted and free. He found his solace while facing the horizon as it lay on the sea, or being in the water itself. 

James had fretted about going to the sea in the early days when there was still the danger of them being sought out, but nowadays it was very common for Thomas to make the trip even alone if James was uninterested. The plantation would surely have given up the search by now, if indeed they had even bothered in the first place. Captain Flint had no family to crack down on the plantation over negligence, and Thomas’ were long dead. They were no great loss. Thomas already knew how to fight with a blade, and James had since taught him the finer points of marksmanship, so safety outside of their home was not a major concern.

James much favoured the woodland present at the base of their home, shielding the forgotten lodge from over-curious passer-by’s. It was dark and deep, but comfortingly enclosed. In the early days of living there, when he would wake early before Thomas after a troubled sleep or nightmares, he found comfort in walking or even running through the trees with the rising sun. Like with their home, it hid him from the world which had persecuted him, he could be separate and anonymous from it all within the confines of the trees and scrub, completely safe and protected.

James had devoted and wasted the better part of his life on the sea, and had seen how cruel and brutal life on it was. Some of its’ brutality admittedly committed by his own hand. James felt that he had had more than enough of it. It wasn’t a conscious thought, even during his time on the plantation and when they had first encountered it again when they came here. He had been too preoccupied with just being content that finally after so many years of fighting his mind could relax and he could live a life in peace with the one he loved. The sea had by association already robbed him of several years of that life.

Now that the question was being posed to him blatantly, his instinctive response was that he could not give two fucks about the sea.

“I don’t see any reason why I should.” He shrugged. “The sea is a lifeless while also deadly means of transport from one place to the next. It’s a dangerous habitat full of riptides, sharks and despicable scallywags like myself. And more scurvy than you could shake a stick at. What was there to appreciate about it?”

Thomas chuckled, the vibrations travelling from his chest up through James’ arms. “Come now, there must have been something to its appeal, or why else would you have stayed there so long?”

“Loot, gold and destroying the British empire bit by bit were the appeals, or have you forgotten the point of piracy?”

Thomas cocked an eyebrow. “And yet here you are, no loot or gold, and the British empire still stands. Did it get boring?”

James grinned and lazily extracted one of his arms to trace his fingers over the chest of his beloved. “No, I just found something better than all of that.”

“Better than gold?”

“Worth more than all the Urca gold in its entirety.” James smiled affectionately. 

Thomas fake scoffed as though such flattery was comedic, though James knew how deeply he had always been affected by the essential truth of the statement. Who the bloody hell could have imagined that while Thomas had been busy reaping sugar cane covered in filth, he had at the same time unknowingly prevented a destructive war with the most powerful empire in the world just by his very existence?

Thomas caressed his beloved’s face tenderly, tucking a strand of auburn behind its owner’s ear. “But seriously, is there not the smallest part of you that misses it?”

James groaned and buried his face into the crook of Thomas’ neck. “You never did learn to quit while you were ahead, did you Lord Hamilton?”

“Nope.” 

He sighed in defeat. “The sea, I suppose, had its good points. It was wild and unbiased and bowed to no one, so to master it gave a sense of power like no other. I was one of those who could master it particularly well, as an ex naval officer and a captain, while I could never hope to control it I could work it to my advantage over those who could not. That feeling of power is highly addictive.”

Thomas watched him intently as he spoke, still stroking his hair.

“The sea also gives more equality on the battlefronts. There’s only a limited number of resources available to both you and your enemy out there, which would not be the case on land. Victory tastes sweeter when it had equal potential to swing both ways, but favoured you.”

Indeed, Captain Flint had been victorious more times than not in his battles at sea. Though he wasn’t sure if the equality of his victories was as true as he liked to believe, nor the sweetness of it. Flint admittedly had done some terrible things to achieve his victories, made people who sometimes didn’t deserve it suffer at his hands. The pride of victory might dull the guilt but it never made the blood on Flint’s hands wash away, the hands of a killer, the hands which by all rights did not deserve to touch a man like Thomas Hamilton. 

And yet Thomas now had one of those hands in his free one and was absently playing with the fingers of it while he listened.

“The sea…. For many, what calls them to the sea is the freedom and unpredictability it offers. There’s new places to see, no day is quite like the next, the promise of adventure is a given. One day you could be making port in one of the most exotic places on earth, the next you could be caught up in a maelstrom, or narrowly escaping pirates, all while doing your job. You could see the many things the world has to offer and still make your fortune. It’s all terribly exciting, especially for men who have no real prospects: a beggar, an illiterate, a carpenter’s son….” James trailed off.

“I’m not suggesting for a second that I want it to, but has that call of excitement ever called you even once in the past six years? Do you miss that high now that you live a settled life?”

James noticed Thomas’ blank yet underlying anxious expression, which would be practically undetectable had James not know his face as well as his own. For as long as James had known him he had never known Thomas to be anything less than fearless in everything he did. This extended to asking questions which he knew he might not like the answers to, but preferring the painful truth to a lie. 

James knew Thomas would feel guilty should he admit to ever having felt the pull of the sea in the time they’d been together. Thomas was too intelligent a man to think that James’ love for the sea was stronger than that which he had for him, but all the same Thomas wouldn’t have liked to feel responsible for taking his beloved away from something else he loved.

As he’d mentioned, there were valid reasons for any former seafarer to miss the sea. He also had his personal reasons; there were times where he sincerely missed Silver, Madi and his other companions, many of whom were long dead. Despite his share of bad ones, he did have some fond memories of the wide-open water which occasionally might tug the nostalgic strings of his heart and mind. 

Yet, the first fond memory which sprung to his mind when thinking about the sea was not related to his days in the navy, or hunting the Urca gold, or success over the British forces. Nothing near as exciting or adventurous. 

It was of Thomas, the very first time he had seen the sea when they had first come here. They had spent the past two weeks running, trying to put as many miles between them and the plantation as possible, stopping only to sleep rough and eat quick meals of food they’d had to steal. One morning they’d came to this place, and the sea opened up like a portrait before them causing Thomas to stop in his tracks. Although James felt that they should keep moving, he’d supposed a few minutes rest wouldn’t hurt.

So, they went down to the sea. While James watched, Thomas stood up to his knees in the water, initially wincing as he experienced the strange sensation of the water’s movement and feel of sand beneath his feet for the first time in over a decade. For a few seconds he just stood, eyes watching the waves mesmerizingly. Then, fully clothed, he had lowered himself onto his haunches and wrapped his arms around his knees, letting the waves roll in around him. He shivered at their first hit against his chest, then fully relaxed and closed his eyes, smile widening as though the waves had drawn away with them all the cobwebs and misery he’d endured in his years of captivity. 

It was at that moment James decided if he had to build a house near that spot from the foundations up, it would be done. 

This then led on to other memories quite unrelated to the sea. Such as the luck of finding of the old abandoned lodge they had made their own and together spending weeks making it fit for a home. A generous amount of money, enough to see them comfortable for years, forwarded by Jack Rackham on James’ request had helped greatly. For a carpenter’s son James found he was shamefully terrible at wood work, whereas Thomas had had years of practice on the plantation. Then there was waking up on their first morning in the run-down place on an old shabby mattress, and the first time they took a leisurely walk through the woodland in broad daylight with Thomas’ hand in his own, unashamed and unafraid of being caught. Then there came cultivating a garden for their own food and learning that while Thomas surpassed him in manual skill he was rubbish at cooking in comparison. 

Although they were living on the outskirts of civilisation, generally only venturing into their local town every so often for supplies, in their second year here they had been able to travel to further places. James had made this possible through the obtaining of two free horses who had been left outside the glue factory, deemed too skinny to be of any use. It was amazing how the right care could have so much effect almost instantly.  
Dante and Miguel were currently still strong, healthy and happily roaming the vast woodland beyond the home of their masters, returning home for feeding or when called. The four of them had explored many different towns and areas since. They never stayed too long out of caution, though they both enjoyed the experiences of these new places in complete anonymity.

 

Then there were small, silly memories of everyday life. Thomas reading in the mornings, the pair of them fencing, arguing over stupid things, working their vegetable plot. Thomas smiling as though James was the most important person in the world as they discuss the goings on of the world. Then back to Thomas swimming in the sea, just that morning. The sea.

James blinked as he realised his thoughts had come full circle and Thomas was still looking to him for an answer. Propping himself up on an elbow so that he was overlooking Thomas, he took a breath.

“The sea and its experiences formed a huge part of my life, both with its evils and its appeals. The evils of it will forever scar me, but I can’t deny its good points as I have already explained. I don’t think it’s something you ever fully can leave behind. The people I’ve met and befriended along the way will also always be a major part of me. 

But the sea holds no peace. Not for me at least. From that day in London when our lives were flipped upside down, until the second I saw you digging on that plantation, I had known no peace. Captain Flint was a sea entity born out of chaos, and for years all I bloody well wanted was to eventually cast him back to the tide and walk away from both him and the sea. I was so ready to find some peace. The only thing was, I failed to find any sort of harbour.”

He cupped the face of his beloved gently, thumb stroking the blond facial hair almost delicately. “Then I was reunited with you. You are my harbour. And I find more happiness and peace in a single morning here than I did in my whole decade at sea. So to be blunt, if the sea ever was to call to me again, I’d tell it to go fuck itself.”

“You think far too unjustly highly of me, my love.” Thomas muttered softly, hand covering the one resting against his cheek and turning his face to kiss the palm. 

“I’ve been told that by several people since 1705, it would be a shame to stop now.” James grinned.

Thomas’ cerulean eyes burned with both amusement and wild, almost manic love. “You are honestly so….” He paused as he searched for the right word.

“Indescribable?” James offered with a chuckle, resting his forehead against that of his love and nuzzling his nose.

“Indescribable is a good word.”

**Author's Note:**

> Follow up from my original FlintHamilton post. Title inspired by one of the greatest ever love songs, U2's 'All I want is you." All and any reviews welcome, please let me know your thoughts.   
> Have a blessed day, thanks for reading!


End file.
